Plug Slug

Plug Slugs is a Critter found in the starting Swampy Biome (Spaced Out). They produce Hydrogen, Eggs, Meat, and generate Power. They can be domesticated.

Behavior
Similar to Dreckos and Pips, Plug Slugs are able to scale walls and walk along the ceiling. During the night Plug Slugs will nest on a ceiling and hang down, creating a socket two tiles below the ceiling (the lower tile of the slug) from which power can be drained. They will prefer to plug themselves onto exposed wires, and will avoid machines if possible.

They emit up to 400 Watts of power if wild, or up to 1600 Watts of power when tamed. The output for slugs will be lower if they are hungry or unhappy, down to 0W if starving, rendering the starvation-ranching nonviable beyond locking wild ones away in an separate room. Crowding also appears to lower power output, though the exact numbers remain in flux as the Swampy asteroid continues to be balanced (Dec 2020). Crowding slugs also reduces their power output to one fifth of what it would be, so a maximum of 80 for wild, and 320 for tame. Keep this in mind if you are starvation ranching your slugs.

Since Nighttime lasts 75 seconds on a 600s cycle, this means they generate up to 50W, or 200W on average (up to 3 basic batteries or 3/4 of Jumbo Battery per wild slug per night). However these numbers can be lower in practice, since Slugs first have to path to a nesting-place come nightfall, and immediately wake up come sunrise. For reference, this puts a fully fed domesticated Plug Slug (or four wild) on par with a Manual Generator.

Plug Slugs can eat all kinds of unrefined Metal Ores, and excrete Hydrogen when they do so. Due to alterations of Space Biome with the DLC, Ores may no longer be an easily renewable resource, therefore Plug Slugs ranching is not a viable method to gain either power or food.

Cracking a Plug Slug Egg yields 1000g of Raw Egg and 100g of Egg Shell.

It drops 3200 kcal (2 kg) of Meat on death.

Plug Slug
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Location
A number of Plug Slugs can be found on the Swampy Asteroid in the Spaced Out DLC. This number varies, but at minimum is 5 fully mature Slugs. More will spawn when starting on the Swampy Asteroid, although the generation rules seem to be similar between the Terra & Swampy starts. Additional Plug Slugs can be printed or found in Swampy pockets on other Asteroids.

vs Hatches for Power
Well-fed Hatches produce 70kg Coal per cycle. A Coal Generator uses 1kg Coal per second to produce 600W. Effectively generating 0.6*70 = 42 kJ of energy per critter per day.

Well-fed Plug Slugs produce 1600 W of power per Night (75 Seconds) or 1.6*75 = 120 kJ of direct energy per critter per day. Well-fed Plug Slugs also produce 3kg of Hydrogen per day, which can power an 800W Hydrogen Generator for 30 seconds for an additional 24 kJ of storable energy per critter per day. This combines to a total of 144 kJ per critter per day.

However, Stone Hatches have the advantage of using a very abundant and even renewable source of food (through Volcanoes), and the source of energy, the coal they produce, is more easily stored than Hydrogen, or energy in batteries.